While the main topic is still relevant for certain items I don't really think that the devs plan on changing the game in any direction anymore (like disassembling or having upgrade paths)... otherwise they would have done so already.

So from my point of view the thread can be closed or at least made unsticky.

Try not to be so eager to lay down that thick sarcasm that you forget to check the time stamps, dood.

Item recycling might be cool but it has two major issues to be addressed. What happens if you build items and send them directly into the recycler? This is honestly easier to accomplish than you might think and doesn't do anything for the player. Factorio tries to be more fail safe I.E. when you screw up the base simply doesn't work right. A recycling mistake will devour resources and screw lots of things up.

There is also a second major issue of "how much to give"? If the item recycles into half your input then you don't get much out of it. However if a blue circuit recycles into ore then you can run all those ingredients back through prod3 modules and maybe get MORE resources out of thin air! Free resource loops are an even bigger balance snafu than automating production into a recycling black hole.

A great deal of items can be reused into science or the rocket. Anything that doesn't get used tends to have limited production anyways, so there are not a lot of items that need recycling. Once you get buffer chests it becomes easy to put items back into their shopping malls so they can get readily reused. And of course there is always the classic "don't build more than you need" to solve all recycling needs.

bobucles wrote:Factorio tries to be more fail safe I.E. when you screw up the base simply doesn't work right.

Unless it's the ammo feed for your turrets, or power to your outposts. Then you're screwed =D

But I'm not really in favour of a recycler either way, I would just like to see an easier way of deleting items. I know there's the whole "put everything in a wooden chest and shoot it" method but if you've done that for the majority of stuff and then deconstruct something and end up with one small power pole, what then? I have to wander off in search of a tree to make a chest that I can then destroy. When I get bots I just dump junk in my trash slots and let it rot in my logistic network.

But the biggest problem for me is Steel Furnaces. With the new science Steel has become a lot more valuable, especially if you try to use solar power to any useful degree, but how do you expand? Do I build a few hundred Steel Furnaces and suffer through the Steel shortages? Or do I build twice as many Stone Furnaces and waste a whole lot of setup and deconstruct time? It's a no-win situation. It's not even quite as viable to just use Steel Furnaces for the mid game because of the large amount of Coal they consume, and the additional difficulty of supplying that coal. Even if steam engines are less efficient, they're much easier to connect to a rail network and keep supplied.

I used a mod that had furnaces build into each other and it felt a lot more organic.

It would be nice to at least have a building that will just get rid of your trash. Maybe it could even give a small amount of power (like an incinerator). I'm sure this already exists as a mod but it would be nice to have in Vanilla, if only so people don't have to destroy chests to get rid of items.

I'd love it if steel furnaces replaced Electric mining drills as part of the Blue science recipe. The raw material cost between the two items is very comparable so the overall difficulty stays the same. It also is a stronger help early on because the player needs 2 steel furnaces for every mining drill(4x for steel smelting), thus it is more important to automate furnaces than drills. The tech tree tries to make you automate things at the right time and blue science is the right time to build lots of furnaces. Later on the modified blue science becomes a great way to dispose of excess steel furnaces. You might build over 2000 steel furnaces so adding them to blue science will really help recycle them.

The assembly machine item was removed from production science because it is literally the same recipe as the electric mining drill (minus 1 iron). If blue science got steel furnaces, production science should get mining drills to restore the old balance. Purple tech is just the right point where the player has their smelting up and now needs to mass expand.

I'd like to see a use for *boilers*, personally. The logical place in my books would be train locomotives, because trains never get obsolete and they *are* steam-powered. Could include them in the tank and car recipes as well, for consistency.

Each tier of armour requiring the previous tier as a baseline is also a good idea in my books.